


Nights of Reading

by ashleybenlove



Category: Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Genre: Bedtime Stories, Community: disney_kink, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-19 13:50:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14874944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashleybenlove/pseuds/ashleybenlove
Summary: As soon as she was old enough to understand, he began to read to her.





	Nights of Reading

**Author's Note:**

> I originally posted this anonymously in October 2011 on the Disney Kink Meme for the prompt: "Maurice read her a bedtime story every night."

As soon as she was old enough to understand, he began to read to her. It started with little short stories, stuff that was a few pages long at best. But, once Belle was six or seven years old, the books she wanted to have read to her at night were much longer. Instead of ten pages, they were fifty pages or longer and sometimes more than a hundred pages. And instead of reading the longer books in one go, in the half hour before she went to bed, Maurice would stop after around thirty minutes, always taking care to stop at the end of the chapter, knowing she wouldn’t like it if he stopped during the action of a chapter. 

Doing this every night fostered her intense love of reading, and taught her how to read. She followed along with him, and eventually even read what he read to her the previous night the next day on her own. 

Over the years, Belle got to hear readings of the collected works of William Shakespeare, _One Thousand and One Nights_ , and various other playwrights and authors by the time she was ten. She made a remark when she was about nine that in a way, Maurice was like Scheherazade and she was like the King, wanting to hear more of a story everyday, minus the whole killing thing. Plus, the analogy made sense, as he spent years and years reading to her at night.

And Maurice spent nearly decade reading to her every night. He enjoyed it greatly and finally, when Belle, midway through her twelfth year of life said that she wanted to read on her own at night that he actually felt a little bereaved.


End file.
